Human Voice

Studs Terkel was a magnificent and mighty human being. He was unfailingly generous. He loved people and made their lives better by listening deeply to what they had to say. He found poetry in the words of everyday folks, and was himself one of the great raconteurs ever to grace God's green earth. When Studs was 91 ½, he took time to fly to New York City to cut the ribbon on our first StoryCorps Booth in Grand Central Terminal. At the opening, Studs proclaimed, "We know who the architect of Grand Central...

Ready for a computer to deliver you a daily radio newscast? Tribune Digital Ventures, the technology arm of Tribune Co., has launched Newsbeat, a news-aggregation app that sifts through around 7,000 stories per day from newspapers -- including Tribune's Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune -- and other websites. Those articles are then converted into audio, using synthetic text-to-speech voices or in some cases human voiceovers, and...

AUSTIN, Texas -- During a short but ravishing set by Indians -- the band/project helmed by Danish singer and multi-instrumentalist Soren Lokke Juul -- the question had to be asked: Is it the setting or the artist? I've seen so many powerful performances at the Central Presbyterian Church on 8th Street over the years at the South by Southwest Music Conference that it's almost expected: St. Vincent, Tune-Yards, Rhys Chatham. Add Indians to the list Thursday. Juul's first performance...

BOSTON (Reuters) - The big ears are not just for show. Elephants can tell whether a human poses a threat by listening to his voice and sussing out subtle clues about his age, gender and ethnicity, according to a study released on Monday. Researchers from the University of Sussex and the Amboseli Trust for Elephants played recordings of human voices to wild elephants in Kenya and watched how they reacted. "Our results demonstrate that elephants can reliably...

It's a statistic that confounds and frustrates just about anyone who works to make sure the sounds of everyday living are heard: Only about 1 in 5 Americans with hearing loss actually uses a hearing aid. The stumbling blocks? The cost of hearing aids, and the fact that most insurance policies won't cover the devices that make it possible to hear a bird chirping or someone yelling across the room. Or a siren. Or fire alarm. Typically, a hearing aid costs $1,000 to $3,000 (and, remember, that's per ear)

AUSTIN, Texas -- During a short but ravishing set by Indians -- the band/project helmed by Danish singer and multi-instrumentalist Soren Lokke Juul -- the question had to be asked: Is it the setting or the artist? I've seen so many powerful performances at the Central Presbyterian Church on 8th Street over the years at the South by Southwest Music Conference that it's almost expected: St. Vincent, Tune-Yards, Rhys Chatham. Add Indians to the list Thursday. Juul's first performance...

`Thank you for calling the Customer Satisfaction Hotline. Listen carefully to the following options: To hear a recording about how important your call is, press one. To hear how much we care about you, press two. To hear some hilarious out-takes of us trying to record one and two with straight faces, press three. If you insist on speaking to a customer representative, or if you have a rotary phone, you're obviously the sort of consumer that this economy no longer needs, so please stay on the line as...

Studs Terkel was a magnificent and mighty human being. He was unfailingly generous. He loved people and made their lives better by listening deeply to what they had to say. He found poetry in the words of everyday folks, and was himself one of the great raconteurs ever to grace God's green earth. When Studs was 91 ½, he took time to fly to New York City to cut the ribbon on our first StoryCorps Booth in Grand Central Terminal. At the opening, Studs proclaimed, "We know who the architect of Grand Central...

Pat Conroy's mother raised him to be a writer. "She did it by reading to me every night of my childhood, and when I think of that childhood, I think of my mother's voice and how beautiful she made the English language sound," he said recently. Small wonder, then, that Conroy's books are so well-suited as performance literature. In fact, his new and long-awaited novel, "Beach Music," is probably better read out loud than silently. The stories within stories within stories of this...

It's a statistic that confounds and frustrates just about anyone who works to make sure the sounds of everyday living are heard: Only about 1 in 5 Americans with hearing loss actually uses a hearing aid. The stumbling blocks? The cost of hearing aids, and the fact that most insurance policies won't cover the devices that make it possible to hear a bird chirping or someone yelling across the room. Or a siren. Or fire alarm. Typically, a hearing aid costs $1,000 to $3,000 (and, remember, that's per ear)

The Geneva summit turned out to be just about what the White House had been predicting: a fair amount of good conversation. It did not achieve any dramatic breakthrough on arms control, but that's because neither side particularly wanted it to. And as a consequence, the summit did nothing to ease the economic pressure the arms race creates for both. But it did put the leaders of the world's two great superpowers together for some extended discussion, and you have to be encouraged by that.

You might wonder what a picture of two lions from the zoo has to do with Suzan Bond's leadership coaching business. It's all about blogging, and starting conversations that just might lead to a new customer. "It's kind of a way to warm the prospect up," said Bond, who launched her blog from her Web site, GrowLeadership.com, in May. The photo of the lions, along with Bond's thoughts on how a powerful presence is important for leadership, spurred several responses from people Bond didn't...

BOSTON (Reuters) - The big ears are not just for show. Elephants can tell whether a human poses a threat by listening to his voice and sussing out subtle clues about his age, gender and ethnicity, according to a study released on Monday. Researchers from the University of Sussex and the Amboseli Trust for Elephants played recordings of human voices to wild elephants in Kenya and watched how they reacted. "Our results demonstrate that elephants can reliably...

`Thank you for calling the Customer Satisfaction Hotline. Listen carefully to the following options: To hear a recording about how important your call is, press one. To hear how much we care about you, press two. To hear some hilarious out-takes of us trying to record one and two with straight faces, press three. If you insist on speaking to a customer representative, or if you have a rotary phone, you're obviously the sort of consumer that this economy no longer needs, so please stay on the line as...

The federal bureaucracy-long held up as the most pronounced example of layers upon layers of humans getting in the way of things being efficiently accomplished-may or may not be on its way to oblivion. Every new presidential administration decries the wastefulness of the bureaucracy, and vows to shrink it. Yet any citizen who ever has to deal with the government walks away dizzied by the human maze that must be wended through in the course of finding an answer to the...

The federal bureaucracy-long held up as the most pronounced example of layers upon layers of humans getting in the way of things being efficiently accomplished-may or may not be on its way to oblivion. Every new presidential administration decries the wastefulness of the bureaucracy, and vows to shrink it. Yet any citizen who ever has to deal with the government walks away dizzied by the human maze that must be wended through in the course of finding an answer to the...

Ready for a computer to deliver you a daily radio newscast? Tribune Digital Ventures, the technology arm of Tribune Co., has launched Newsbeat, a news-aggregation app that sifts through around 7,000 stories per day from newspapers -- including Tribune's Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune -- and other websites. Those articles are then converted into audio, using synthetic text-to-speech voices or in some cases human voiceovers, and...

Pat Conroy's mother raised him to be a writer. "She did it by reading to me every night of my childhood, and when I think of that childhood, I think of my mother's voice and how beautiful she made the English language sound," he said recently. Small wonder, then, that Conroy's books are so well-suited as performance literature. In fact, his new and long-awaited novel, "Beach Music," is probably better read out loud than silently. The stories within stories within stories of this...

You might wonder what a picture of two lions from the zoo has to do with Suzan Bond's leadership coaching business. It's all about blogging, and starting conversations that just might lead to a new customer. "It's kind of a way to warm the prospect up," said Bond, who launched her blog from her Web site, GrowLeadership.com, in May. The photo of the lions, along with Bond's thoughts on how a powerful presence is important for leadership, spurred several responses from people Bond didn't...

The Geneva summit turned out to be just about what the White House had been predicting: a fair amount of good conversation. It did not achieve any dramatic breakthrough on arms control, but that's because neither side particularly wanted it to. And as a consequence, the summit did nothing to ease the economic pressure the arms race creates for both. But it did put the leaders of the world's two great superpowers together for some extended discussion, and you have to be encouraged by that.